Background: First experiences in the operating theatre with real patients are always stressful and intimidating for students. We hypothesized that a game-like simulation could improve perceptions and performance of novices.Methods: A videogame was developed, combining pictures and short videos, by which students are interactively instructed on acting at the surgical block. Moreover, the game includes detailed descriptive information. After playing, students are given feedback on their performance. A randomized controlled trial was conducted with 132 nursing and medical students with no previous experience in surgery. Sixty two (47.0%) were allocated to a control group (CG) and 70 (53.0%) to an experimental group (EG). Subjects in EG played the game the day prior to their first experience in the theatre; CG had no access to the application. On the day after their experience at surgery, all students filled in a questionnaire in a 7-point Likert format collecting subjective data about their experience in the surgical block. Four constructs related to students' feelings, emotions and attitudes were measured through self-reported subjective scales, i.e. C1: fear to make mistakes, C2: perceived knowledge on how to behave, C3: perceived errors committed, and C4: attitude/behaviour towards patients and staff. The main research question was formulated as follows: do students show differences in constructs Cl C4 by exposure to the game?Results: EG reported statistically significant higher scores on the four aspects measured than CG (p < 0.05; Mann-Whitney U tests; Cohen's d standardized effect size d1 = 0.30; d2 = 1.05; d3 = 0.39; d4 = 0.49).Conclusions: Results show clear evidence that the exposure to the game-like simulation had a significant positive effect on all the constructs. After their first visit to the theatre, students in EG showed less fear (C1) and also perceived to have committed fewer errors (C3), while they showed higher perceived knowledge (C2) and a more collaborative attitude (C4).

This study examines the influence of players' age, gender, and gaming preferences and habits (from now on, "gaming preferences") on the effectiveness of a specific videogame that has been designed to increase the interest towards classical theater among teenagers. Using a validated instrument, participants were divided into four groups based on their gaming preferences: (1) Wellrounded (WR) gamers, who play all types of games often; (2) Hardcore players, who frequently tend to play first-person shooter (FPS) and sports games; (3) Casual players, who play moderately and tend to play music, social, and puzzle games; and (4) Non-gamers, who barely play videogames at all. Among all of the participants' personal factors (age, gender, and type of player) that were measured, only gaming preferences seemed to have a significant (p<.05) positive influence on students' interest in theater-going. Neither age nor gender seemed to affect the outcomes. Casual and Well-rounded gamers scored higher in the game than Non-gamers and Hardcore players. Due to these results, we also explored whether the gaming profile affected traditional educational approaches. Traditional education worked better than videogames only for students who do not usually play videogames. This study suggests that gaming preferences may influence the effectiveness of different educational approaches. Knowing students' gaming preferences in advance may help educators find the best educational approach for each student.

Educational data mining concerns with developing the methods for discovering knowledge from data that come from educational environment. In this paper we used educational data mining to analyze learning behavior of modern students. In our case study, we collected students' data from a higher education institution in terms of the mentioned attributes. After preprocessing the data, we applied data mining techniques to discover classification, clustering and the algorithms such as AD Tree, J48 Tree and Random Tree. The hierarchical clusters were grouped with related similarities and analysis was experimented using WEKA tool. In each of these tasks, we extracted knowledge that describes students' learning behavior between traditional learning and virtual learning. The comparative performance of the above said algorithms are quantified with the values of stratified cross validation (SCV) are tabulated and illustrated in charts.

In the era of digital gaming, there is a pressing need to better understand how people's gaming preferences and habits affect behavior and can inform educational game design. However, instruments available for such endeavor are rather informal and limited, lack proper evaluation, and often yield results that are hard to interpret. In this paper we present the design and preliminary validation (involving N = 754 Spanish secondary school students) of a simple instrument that, based on a 10-item Game Preferences Questionnaire (GPQ), classifies participants into four 'clusters' or types of gamers, allowing for easy interpretation of the results. These clusters are: (1) Full garners, covering individuals that play all kinds of games with a high frequency; (2) Hardcore garners, playing mostly first-person shooters and sport games; (3) Casual garners, playing moderately musical, social and thinking games; and (4) Non-gamers, who do not usually play games of any kind. The instrument may have uses in psychology and behavioral sciences, as there is evidence suggesting that attitudes towards gaming affects personal attitudes and behavior. Besides, we propose applying the instrument to help designers of educational games to get better tailored their games to their target audiences. (c) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

It is our great pleasure to serve as guest editors for this special issue of the IEEE RITA journal, which holds a fine selection of the most relevant papers presented at symposium on information and communication technologies in education 2013, the fifteenth international symposium in educational technology held in Madrid in September 2013. The two papers included in this special issue are representative of the high quality observed during all the conference.

In this paper we introduce Mokap, a novel authoring and development toolset for serious games. Mokap aims to address two specific challenges: provide support for early development stage design and facilitate involvement of domain experts. More specifically, on the one hand, it aims to make serious game authoring possible for people with no technical background. On the other hand, Mokap provides explicit support for activities related to analysis and design, especially useful during the early stages of development. In this sense, Mokap aims to facilitate the transition from the designers' board to the programmers' environment and also to enhance communication between the different roles of the development team. Developed as an open source environment, Mokap is oriented to mobile devices (tablets and smartphones), a kind of technology most educational stakeholders are familiar with. We present the main design concepts behind Mokap, along with some technical insight into the platform and the description of the game Listen With Lemur as a case study.

We propose the organization of a Mokap hackathon. In this activity participants will have the opportunity to develop interactive content using the Mokap Android app, either individually or in groups. Mokap is a new authoring tool for creating interactive content, developed by the e-UCM research group. It allows composing scenes by combining text, hand drawings, pictures and elements imported from an online repository. Mokap also supports basic animation and interaction. Users can take advantage of this functionality to create presentations, training materials, simulations, postcards and even simple games. We will start the activity with an introduction to Mokap, followed by a quick demo. Then we will help participants design their own mokaps and implement them. At the end of the activity participants will be given the possibility to share their mokaps with the rest of the audience. Participants will vote online to choose the best mokap developed during the session, which will be awarded a symbolic prize.

This paper reviews "The foolish lady" experiment: a serious game aimed to increment youngsters' interest towards the classical theater play. The article overviews all the phases of the project, from game design to the evaluation in schools, the results obtained and how these have helped us shape our current research in new and innovative ways, such as taking into account players gaming profiles to better adapt the learning approach to the student.

In this paper we introduce Mokap, a novel authoring and development toolset for serious games. Mokap aims to address two specific challenges: provide support for early development stage design and facilitate involvement of domain experts. More specifically, on the one hand, it aims to make serious game authoring possible for people with no technical background. On the other hand, Mokap provides explicit support for activities related to analysis and design, especially useful during the early stages of development. In this sense, Mokap aims to facilitate the transition from the designers' board to the programmers' environment and also to enhance communication between the different roles of the development team. Developed as an open source environment, Mokap is oriented to mobile devices (tablets and smartphones), a kind of technology most educational stakeholders are familiar with. We present the main design concepts behind Mokap, along with some technical insight into the platform and the description of the game Listen With Lemur as a case study.

The increasing body of evidence supporting the use of videogames in educational settings (usually referred to as serious games) is pushing their deployment across different areas of the educational system. However, this increased adoption also raises serious ethical issues: videogames are one of the least accessible forms of multimedia, and if education is to embrace serious games, there is an imperative need for universal accessibility in serious games to prevent a digital divide. However, producing accessible games is expensive and effort consuming, and serious games development already fare with limited budgets. In this work we explore the potential impact of the (semi-) automatic adaptation of game interfaces as a way to facilitate accessible game development (and thus trim the cost down). We propose a game interface model optimized for point-and-click adventure games, a popular genre among serious games that we have used to perform different semi-automatic adaptations in a game. We have tested the resulting adapted game with end users with specific disability profiles. Our tests discovered that the automatic adaptations produced usable games that retained part of their attractive, although different usability issues had a negative impact on the user experience. We also discuss the origins of such limitations and propose possible remediation actions, as well as a refined interface model.

The value of educational video games in education is undeniable and the benefits of using video games in classroom instruction have been proved by many researchers. Nevertheless, these benefits have not been proved sufficiently for some domains, such as artistic disciplines. In this paper we explore the effects of an educational video game on high school students' interest towards classical theatre. The game covers the story of "The Foolish Lady" (La Dama Boba) based on the homonymous classic theatre play by Spanish playwright Lope de Vega. A mixed experimental design was followed, whereby researchers conducted pre-tests and post-tests to estimate the effect of playing the video game on student interest (within-subjects factor) towards theatre. We also measured changes in linguistic knowledge and knowledge about the play. The experiment was carried out with 754 students from 8 different schools in the Madrid region in Spain, divided into experimental group and two control groups. With the objective of improving the comparative power of the study, two control groups were used: (1) traditional teaching with the usual teacher and, (2) as the best educative case we could implement, teaching with a professional actor who had played the male protagonist of the theatre play. The experimental group played the video game. Results show that the video game was more effective in incrementing students' interest in theatre than the traditional class, but slightly less effective than the class with the actor. On the other hand, game and teacher approaches obtained similar results in the improvement of students' knowledge about the play's plot and some linguistic concepts. These results open up a new horizon in using video games as motivators in different artistic domains.

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar el impacto de los videojuegos cómo herramientas para aumentar el interés de los jóvenes hacia el teatro clásico. El estudio se ha llevado a cabo en 8 colegios e institutos de la Comunidad de Madrid y ha implicado a 754 alumnos de enseñanza secundaria de entre 11 y 16 años. En este artículo se detallan las distintas etapas del proyecto: (1) adaptación de la obra de teatro “La Dama Boba” de Lope de Vega a una aventura gráfica educativa, (2) evaluación de la herramienta por parte de expertos en la materia, y (3) por último, evaluación experimental en los colegios. Para la evaluación del juego utilizamos dos grupos de control: uno que recibía una clase sobre la obra de teatro impartida por su profesor habitual, y un segundo cuya clase magistral estaba impartida por uno de los actores protagonistas de la obra de teatro y que representaba el mejor caso educativo factible en línea con el objetivo del proyecto (aumentar el interés frente al teatro). Los resultados del estudio mostraron que el juego supone un enfoque ligeramente más motivador que el profesor, pero se encuentra muy lejos de la clase del actor, que está muy por encima de ambos. Además el sexo resultó ser un factor determinante en el grupo experimental, registrándose un mayor aumento del interés en las chicas que en los chicos.

Every day, more people are interested in learning computer science (CS), either to improve their skill set to apply for new jobs or just for personal growth. The sector of the population looking for instruction on these subjects has increased and diversified. We need new tools that appeal to this wider audience, and game-based learning is one of the most promising approaches at the moment. There is a need for more scalable game-based instruction paradigms that can be easily adapted to different levels of complexity and content related to CS (different programming languages, different programming paradigms, and so on). Throughout this paper, we present a flexible and scalable architecture to create videogames for learning CS languages. The architecture is based on the idea that students control the game using small pieces of text written in some CS language. The keys of the scalability of our approach are: 1) it separates the CS language used to write the programs from the game design and 2) the game model provides a system of levels that allows incremental learning of CS language structures. As validation and implementation of our approach, we developed Lost in Space, an educational videogame to teach the XML markup language. In this game, the player travels through several levels, guiding a spaceship by introducing small pieces of XML in a text console. Players can move and rotate the ship among other power-ups that get unblocked as they advances in the game. The game was tested with undergraduate students from CS and social sciences, by comparing it with traditional instruction (i.e., a teacher with a slides presentation). Students who played the game were much more engaged than those who attended the lecture, showing a more active attitude throughout the whole experience and also spent more time practicing after class. Findings also suggest that the game was effective for instruction, regardless of the background of the students. However, the educational gain observed with the game-based instructional approach, although effective, was not significantly higher than traditional instruction. We think that our approach is adequate to introduce CS languages in general, as well as new programming languages, and seems to be more appealing to new comers than traditional instruction.

The Web is rapidly shifting towards more dynamic and interactive content. One clear example is the increasing use of web-based digital games. However, the more interactive a piece of content is, the more difficult it is to make it universally accessible. Besides, users are increasingly demanding ubiquitous access to the content and applications they use (including games), resulting in a need for ensuring that Web content is also multiplatform. These trends are adding an extra technology challenge for ensuring content accessibility. In this paper we describe our technical approach to create an accessible multiplatform game engine for the new version of the eAdventure educational game authoring platform (eAdventure 2.0). This approach integrates accessibility as a core design principle instead of adding accessibility features a posteriori. We expect this to facilitate the creation of web-based digital games that are accessible regardless of the context (device, assistive tools available, situation, etc.) in which they are being used. In this work we describe the general architecture, as well as some specific examples of accessibility adaptation plug-ins already available.

In this paper we analyze how to increase the level of accessibility in videogames by adding support for it in game authoring software. This approach can reduce the effort required to make a game accessible for people with disabilities, resulting in significant savings. A case study is presented to support the approach based on the eAdventure educational game authoring platform, which allows semi-automatic adaptation of the games. The game, "My First Day At Work", was made accessible for students with different disability profiles, mainly blindness, low vision and limited mobility, although hearing and cognitive disabilities are also considered. Results show that the effort needed to make the games accessible is moderate in comparison to the total effort dedicated to game development. Although the specific solutions proposed are optimized for educational games, they could be generalized to other game frameworks and purposes (e.g. entertainment, advertising, etc.).

The increasing importance of the video games entertainment industry has prompted different efforts to promote the inclusion of accessibility features within games. Whilst the field of academia has produced relevant and promising results, mainstream producers are still reluctant to invest in access-for-all. However, in the field of academia there is also a growing trend towards introducing games and game-like activities into educational settings usually labeled as ‘serious games’ in an attempt to explore other learning approaches and to improve the engagement of students. Yet while entertainment games can (arguably) opt to ignore accessibility, educational games must be inclusive and cannot afford to ignore it. In this paper, we present our approach to promoting accessible educational games. To reduce the barriers to and costs of creating accessible educational games, we explore the use of game creation tools with built-in accessibility features, as opposed to adding accessibility features ad hoc to existing educational games. Draft version. Please visit http://www.e-ucm.es/publications/all/ for updated citation information DR AF T

The Spanish National Transplant Organization (ONT) in collaboration with the e-UCM research group of the Complutense University of Madrid has developed three screen-based simulations representing the ONT supra-hospital deceased donation management processes. As the ONT is using these game-like simulations as a support tool for its instructional approach, it was necessary to perform a validation of these simulations to assure the knowledge had been correctly represented. This paper describes the methodology followed to validate and estimate how accurately this ONT complex knowledge has been captured (including some tacit knowledge used by the transplant coordination experts) and transferred into these screen-based simulations. We present the results obtained from the validation done with 15 ONT experts and how their feedback was used to improve the simulations.